“For this exhibition, Nick Mauss (b. 1980, New York, NY) explores the history of American modernist ballet, continuing a hybrid mode of working he has pursued for a decade in which the roles of curator, artist, choreographer, scholar, and performer converge. New works by Mauss—ranging from scores for a ballet to scenic design, décor elements, and live performance—will appear alongside pieces from the Whitney’s collection and those of other institutions, including the Kinsey Institute for Sex, Gender, and Reproduction and the Jerome Robbins Dance Division of the New York Public Library. Central to the exhibition is a ballet conceived by Mauss in close collaboration with dancers, in response to archival material and the constellation of objects in the show.

In the current vogue for contemporary dance in museums, the legacy of ballet remains relatively unexamined. This exhibition will consider the intersections of ballet with the visual arts, theater, fashion, and new representations of the body. Focusing on New York’s role in a transatlantic exchange of ballet and surrealist aesthetics, the show presents a vision of American modernist ballet as an artistic catalyst, filter, and vibrant, shared vocabulary. Through the intertwined languages of ballet, painting, photography, and sculpture, Mauss also mines a pre-queer history within the realm of supposedly straight cultural production of the 1930s and 1940s. The exhibition itself is a hybrid of a historical presentation and an unfolding artistic proposition that forges new modes of attention, viewing, and an engagement with history in the present.” — Whitney Museum

]]>Slider3artssummaryHuman+: The Future of Our Species at Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Roma, through July 1, 2018https://artssummary.com/2018/03/13/human-the-future-of-our-species-at-palazzo-delle-esposizioni-roma-through-july-1-2018/
Tue, 13 Mar 2018 16:37:07 +0000http://artssummary.com/?p=28023Read More]]>“Cyborgs, superhumans and clones. Evolution or extinction? What does it mean to be a human today. What will it feel like to be a human a hundred years from now? Technological capabilities are increasing at a rapid pace—should we continue to embrace modifications to our minds, bodies and daily lives, or are there boundaries we shouldn’t overstep?

HUMAN+: The Future of Our Species is an exhibition that explores potential future trajectories of humankind by considering the implications of both historical and emerging technologies. The ‘plus’ symbol in Human+ implies a positive direction for the future of our species. But what is that direction? For the majority of the 20th century, progress has been measured by increased speed and efficiency—faster, better, stronger—but the side effects have been fatter, sadder and exhausted. Our definition of success needs to be recalibrated.

The 21st century will be characterized by the confluence of fields such as biotechnology, robotics and artificial intelligence. Manipulating biological processes, controlling digital and mechanical machines and creating non-biological intelligence above and beyond what humans can comprehend— these advances raise ethical questions about the appropriation of life and the alteration of the self. The converging forces of these and other currents will lead us to a new and unknown place.

From subtle provocations to grand gestures, the artworks in this exhibition consider how these changes might be adopted and assimilated. The value in speculation is not prediction, but reflection. What are we striving for? We are designing our future, consciously or not, and every creator, whatever their discipline, will play a part in this process. In this exhibition artists, designers and scientists speculate on and imagine many possible futures. Now it’s your turn.” — Palazzo delle Esposizioni

The exhibition was conceived and shown for the first time at Science Gallery, Trinity College Dublin. The touring version is co-produced by Science Gallery, Trinity College Dublin and Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona.

Human+: The Future of Our Species was curated by Cathrine Kramer.

Images courtesy Palazzo delle Esposizioni.

]]>Slider2artssummaryThe EY Exhibition: Picasso 1932 – Love, Fame, Tragedy at Tate Modern, March 8 – September 9, 2018https://artssummary.com/2018/03/09/the-ey-exhibition-picasso-1932-love-fame-tragedy-at-tate-modern-march-8-september-9-2018/
Fri, 09 Mar 2018 12:14:48 +0000http://artssummary.com/?p=27969Read More]]>“45 years after the artist’s death, Tate Modern stages its first ever solo exhibition of Pablo Picasso’s work, one of the most ambitious shows in the museum’s history. The EY Exhibition: Picasso 1932 – Love, Fame, Tragedy takes visitors on a month-by-month journey through 1932, a time so pivotal in Picasso’s life and work that it has been called his ‘year of wonders’. More than 100 outstanding paintings, sculptures and works on paper demonstrate his prolific and restlessly inventive character, stripping away common myths to reveal the man and the artist in his full complexity and richness.” — Tate Modern

Achim Borchardt-Hume, Director of Exhibitions, Tate Modern, and co-curator of the exhibition said: ‘Picasso famously described painting as “just another form of keeping a diary”. This exhibition invites you to get close to the artist, to his ways of thinking and working, and to the tribulations of his personal life at a pivotal moment in his career. Visitors will be able to walk through 12 months of Picasso’s life and creative decision-making, to see many of his most ground-breaking and best-loved works in a surprising new light.’

Nancy Ireson, Curator of International Art, Tate, and co-curator of the exhibition said:
‘We are thrilled to be reuniting some of Picasso’s greatest works of art for the first time in 86 years, many of which are rarely shown in public. Displaying them in the order in which they were made demonstrates just how intensely creative 1932 was for Picasso, revealing his explosive energy to a new generation’

“Following in the footsteps of 19th-century artists who celebrated the out-of-doors as a place of leisure, renewal, and inspiration, the exhibition Public Parks, Private Gardens: Paris to Provence explores horticultural developments that reshaped the landscape of France and grounded innovative movements—artistic and green—in an era that gave rise to Naturalism, Impressionism, and Art Nouveau. As shiploads of exotic botanical specimens arrived from abroad and local nurserymen pursued hybridization, the availability and variety of plants and flowers grew exponentially, as did the interest in them. The opening up of formerly royal properties and the transformation of Paris during the Second Empire into a city of tree-lined boulevards and parks introduced public green spaces to be enjoyed as open-air salons, while suburbanites and country-house dwellers were prompted to cultivate their own flower gardens. By 1860, the French journalist Eugène Chapus could write: ‘One of the pronounced characteristics of our Parisian society is that . . . everyone in the middle class wants to have his little house with trees, roses, and dahlias, his big or little garden, his rural piece of the good life’.

The important role of parks and gardens in French life during this period is richly illustrated by paintings, drawings, photographs, prints, illustrated books, and objects in The Met collection by artists extending from Camille Corot to Henri Matisse, many of whom were gardeners themselves. Anchored by Impressionist scenes of outdoor leisure, the presentation offers a fresh, multisided perspective on best-known and hidden treasures housed in a Museum that took root in a park: namely, New York’s Central Park, which was designed in the spirit of Parisian public parks of the same period.” — The Met

The exhibition has been organized by Susan Alyson Stein, Engelhard Curator of Nineteenth-Century European Painting, Department of European Paintings, with Guest Curator Colta Ives, Curator Emerita, Department of Drawings and Prints, and the assistance of Research Associate Laura D. Corey, Department of European Paintings.

“The 2018 edition of The Orchid Show at The New York Botanical Garden is exhibiting commissioned works by acclaimed Belgian floral artist Daniel Ost. Entering its 16th year, the popular exhibition, showcasing thousands of dramatically displayed orchids in the Botanical Garden’s historic Enid A. Haupt Conservatory, features a series of installations crafted by Ost, each a living sculpture that celebrates the individual beauty of these stunning flowers.

One of the world’s leading floral designers, Ost uses flowers as a means of expression. He identifies himself as a bloembinder, the Dutch term for an artist who works with flowers. His large-scale artworks have been tailored to the unique environment of the landmark Victorian style Haupt Conservatory, complementing the architecture of the building while creating a transformative, dazzling spectacle of color, form, and texture. Bamboo, arranged in grids and calling to mind the glass grids of the Conservatory, and clear tubing, meant to both evoke water and connect to the Conservatory’s glass, are among the materials employed in his artful installations to which individual orchids are attached so that each flower and form can be seen and appreciated. The works pay homage to his training in ikebana, the Japanese art of flower arranging. In ikebana, artists value the ideas of wabi-sabi, a philosophy that finds beauty in imperfection, asymmetry, and impermanence.” — New York Botanical Garden

]]>SliderartssummaryZoe Leonard: Survey at Whitney Museum of American Art, March 2 – June 10, 2018https://artssummary.com/2018/03/02/zoe-leonard-survey-at-whitney-museum-of-american-art-march-2-june-10-2018/
Fri, 02 Mar 2018 16:28:11 +0000http://artssummary.com/?p=27858Read More]]>“Over the past three decades, Zoe Leonard (b. 1961) has produced work in photography, sculpture, and installation that is significant for its lyrical observations of daily life, as well as for its rigorous attention to the politics and conditions of image-making and display. Her work is wideranging in both form and subject matter, and addresses themes including gender and sexuality, loss and mourning, migration, displacement, and the urban landscape. Leonard’s approach to photography engages with its history as a utilitarian, vernacular, and popular medium; similarly, her sculptures are often composed of found objects—commonplace items that bear signs of their use. Through repetition, subtle changes of perspective, and shifts of scale, Leonard frames the quotidian in ways that challenge the viewer to reexamine the familiar.

Zoe Leonard: Survey is, as titled, a “survey” exhibition intended to give a broad overview of the artist’s work. But “to survey” is also to look out at a place or site and gauge it from multiple viewpoints in an effort to understand and describe it. It is this kind of mapping that Leonard undertakes both in her work and through the form of the exhibition. She encourages us to consider the Museum itself as a site and to question the conditions—be they cultural, social, economic, or political—that inflect our subjective points of view. Survey offers an opportunity to reflect on the nature of perception and to take the measure of our own relationship to the world.” — Introductory Wall Text

]]>SliderartssummaryGrant Wood: American Gothic and Other Fables at Whitney Museum of American Art, March 2 – June 10, 2018https://artssummary.com/2018/03/02/grant-wood-american-gothic-and-other-fables-at-whitney-museum-of-american-art-march-2-june-10-2018/
Fri, 02 Mar 2018 13:58:50 +0000http://artssummary.com/?p=27799Read More]]>“Grant Wood (1891–1942) became an overnight celebrity following the debut of American Gothic, his now-iconic portrait of a Midwestern farm couple, at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1930. Only a year earlier, he had been a relatively unknown painter of French Impressionist–inspired landscapes in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. His short mature career, from 1930 to 1942, spanned some of the most trying, soul-searching years for the United States, as the country grappled with the aftermath of an economic meltdown and engaged in vigorous, sometimes bitter debates over its core national identity. What emerged as a powerful strain in art and popular culture during this period was a pronounced reverence for the values of community, hard work, and self-reliance that were seen as fundamental to the national character and embodied most fully by America’s small towns and farms. Wood’s farmscapes and portraits epitomized these sentiments. His romanticized depictions of a seemingly more innocent time elevated him into a popular, almost mythic national figure, celebrated for his art and his promotion of Regionalism, the representational style associated with the Midwest that dominated American art during the Depression.

Today, it is clear that the enduring power of Wood’s art owes as much to its mesmerizing psychological ambiguity as to its archetypal Midwestern imagery. An eerie silence and disquiet run throughout his work, complicating its bucolic, elegiac appearance. The tension between his desire to recapture the dreamworld of his childhood and his instincts as a shy, sexually repressed Midwesterner seeped into his art, endowing it with an unsettling solitude and chilling sense of make-believe. Wood’s conflicted relationship with the homeland he professed to adore may be a truer expression of the unresolved tensions in the American experience than he might ever have imagined, more than seventy-five years after his death.” ౼ Introductory Wall Text

Grant Wood: American Gothic and Other Fables is organized by Barbara Haskell, Curator, with Sarah Humphreville, Senior Curatorial Assistant.

Images courtesy Whitney Museum of American Art.

]]>SliderartssummaryAll Too Human: Bacon, Freud and a Century of Painting Life at Tate Britain, February 28 – August 27, 2018https://artssummary.com/2018/03/01/all-too-human-bacon-freud-and-a-century-of-painting-life-at-tate-britain-february-28-august-27-2018/
Thu, 01 Mar 2018 12:25:22 +0000http://artssummary.com/?p=27763Read More]]>“A landmark exhibition at Tate Britain celebrates how artists have captured the intense experience of life in paint. All Too Human: Bacon, Freud and a Century of Painting Life showcases around 100 works by some of the most celebrated modern British artists, with Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon at its heart. It reveals how their art captures personal and immediate experiences and events, distilling raw sensations through their use of paint, as Freud said: ‘I want the paint to work as flesh does’. Bringing together major works by Walter Sickert, Stanley Spencer, Michael Andrews, Frank Auerbach, R.B. Kitaj, Leon Kossoff, Paula Rego, Jenny Saville, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye and many others, this exhibition makes poignant connections across generations of artists and tells an expanded story of figurative painting in the 20th century and into the 21st century.” ౼ Tate Britain

All Too Human: Bacon, Freud and a Century of Painting Life is curated at Tate Britain by Elena Crippa, Curator, Modern and Contemporary British Art, and Laura Castagnini, Assistant Curator. The exhibition will tour to the Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest later in 2018.

Images courtesy Tate Britain.

]]>SliderartssummaryT.C. Cannon: At the Edge of America at Peabody Essex Museum (PEM), March 3 – June 10, 2018https://artssummary.com/2018/02/28/t-c-cannon-at-the-edge-of-america-at-peabody-essex-museum-pem-march-3-june-10-2018/
Wed, 28 Feb 2018 18:06:04 +0000http://artssummary.com/?p=25792Read More]]>“The Peabody Essex Museum (PEM) presents an exhibition celebrating one of the most influential and inventive Native American artists of the 20th-century, T.C. Cannon (1946-1978, Caddo/Kiowa). T.C. Cannon: At the Edge of America explores the dynamic creative range and legacy of an artist whose life was cut short at age 31. Through nearly 90 works, including 30 major paintings, works on paper, poetry and musical recordings, Cannon’s distinctive and affecting worldview shines through in this groundbreaking exhibition that is organized by PEM and will tour the country through 2019. This is the first major traveling exhibition of his work since 1990.

Deeply personal yet undeniably political, Cannon’s artwork adeptly channels his cultural heritage, experience as a Vietnam War veteran, and the turbulent social and political climate that defined 1960s and ‘70s America. Amid ongoing national and global conversations about ethnic identity, social justice, land rights and cultural appropriation, Cannon’s work continues to engage issues that are as relevant now as they were 50 years ago. “Never shying from the complexity and nuance of identity politics, Cannon interrogated American history and popular culture through his Native lens and showed us that Native American history and culture are integral to the American experience,” says Karen Kramer, exhibition curator and PEM’s Curator of Native American and Oceanic Art and Culture.” ౼ PEM

“More than ever, images dominate our reality. The artists in “Songs for Sabotage” treat art as a form of propaganda that turns images on their head in order to reveal the ideologies and built worlds behind them. This tendency echoes the historical notion of sabotage, in which actors impede modes of production from the inside to disturb their normal function. These artists share a concern that entrenched powers of colonialism and institutionalized racism continue to exacerbate inequity. They respond by mapping the violent and isolating effects of these powers on bodies and communities, and by producing objects and images that memorialize individual acts of resistance. They make interventions into cities, infrastructures, and networks embedded in everyday life, proposing objects that might create common experience and disrupt these systems of control.

The artists in “Songs for Sabotage” offer models for dismantling and replacing the political and economic networks that envelop today’s global youth. They are further connected by deep engagement with the specificity of local context, addressing communities and landscapes from Hong Kong to Johannesburg to Athens. At the same time, they adopt a critical examination—and embrace—of the internationalism that links them, finding common cause as a generation living under a shared condition of precarity. Their works range widely in medium and form, including painted allegories for the administration of power, sculptural proposals to renew or destroy monuments, and cinematic works that contend with the ways identity is mobilized in our current era. Viewed in ensemble, these works provide models for working against a system that constantly threatens failure.” — Introductory Wall Text

“Songs for Sabotage” is the fourth edition of the New Museum Triennial, an exhibition series dedicated to emerging artists from around the world. The exhibition is curated by Gary Carrion-Murayari, Kraus Family Curator, and Alex Gartenfeld, Deputy Director and Chief Curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, with Francesca Altamura, Curatorial Assistant.

]]>Slider4artssummaryLesley Dill. Wilderness: Words are where what I catch is me at Nohra Haime Gallery, through March 17, 2018https://artssummary.com/2018/02/23/lesley-dill-wilderness-words-are-where-what-i-catch-is-me-at-nohra-haime-gallery-through-march-24-2018/
Fri, 23 Feb 2018 23:59:05 +0000http://artssummary.com/?p=27541Read More]]>“Lesley Dill’s first major exhibition in New York since 2014 and first solo exhibition with Nohra Haime Gallery features a new body of work drawing on language, the written word, and the investigation of divinity and deviltry during the wildness of Early America.

Reminiscent of Alberto Giacometti’s sculptures, the long, thin figures appearing in Dill’s work wear the strength of the words of the people they represent. Though differing in specific experience, all of these personas have had a powerful impact through their words, and personally connect with the artist. Dill posits that there is something untamable, fierce, and persistent in each of their beliefs, which ultimately unites them. Dill is drawn to this restrictive time period of limited access to a diversity of written word, and the bravery of these figures’ response. Hutchinson, for example, with her famed testimony of religious freedom, was one of the first American women to have her word recognized, recorded and saved as a part of history.” — Nohra Haime Gallery

]]>SliderartssummaryA Queen Within: Adorned Archetypes at New Orleans Museum of Art (NOMA), February 21 – May 28, 2018https://artssummary.com/2018/02/23/a-queen-within-adorned-archetypes-at-new-orleans-museum-of-art-noma-february-21-may-28-2018/
Fri, 23 Feb 2018 12:33:18 +0000http://artssummary.com/?p=27109Read More]]>“Showcasing rare pieces from one of the world’s largest private collections of Alexander McQueen fashion, the New Orleans Museum of Art (NOMA) presents A Queen Within: Adorned Archetypes. NOMA’s first major fashion exhibition will feature contemporary designers showcased in an immersive gallery presentation. This exhibition’s bold couture explores different archetypes of femininity, and how these mythic characters manifest through storytelling in fashion over the past decade.

Designer Alexander McQueen (1969-2010) was a master of building narratives through his collections and runway shows. Inspired by his sensitivity to historical and literary research, A Queen Within uses fashion to explore seven archetypal personality types of a Queen, or metaphorically, of a woman: The Mother Earth, Sage, Magician, Enchantress, Explorer, Heroine and Thespian. These themes, based upon Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung’s work, are derived from recurring motifs in myths and fairy tales of world literature. The story of each feminine archetype—its powers, its weaknesses, its significance—is articulated in A Queen Within through pioneering fashion, photography, and artwork.

A Queen Within: Adorned Archetypes features more than 100 experimental gowns, headpieces, jewelry, and shoes by more than 30 of the world’s most insightful contemporary designers. The exhibition includes household names like McQueen, Prada, Chanel and Comme des Garçons intermixed with other boundary-pushing fashion, like Chromat’s body-positive architectural looks and Iris van Herpen’s dresses that boldly use new technology.” — NOMA

A Queen Within shows fashion’s possibility as an art form, full of glamour, theatricality, escapism, wit and innovation. “A Vivienne Westwood coat is from acollection that called for people to unite in an effort to save Venice, and the rest of our planet, from the effects of climate change. Minna Palmqvist’s mannequin busts capture the beauty of nonconforming bodies, showing how fashion’s pioneers are moving away from the standard size zero dress form. Gypsy Sport’s gender-fluid work is seen as the voice for a new generation that calls for a more global, inclusive world,” said exhibition curators Sofia Hedman-Martynova and Serge Martynov of MUSEEA.